Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday July 26, 2009 @08:08AM
from the consider-crown-copyright dept.

orzetto writes "I work at a research institute, and programming models of physical systems is what I do most of the time. One significant problem when modeling physical processes is finding thermodynamic data. There are some commercial solutions, but these can be quite expensive, and to the best of my knowledge there are no open source efforts in this direction. In my previous job, my company used NIST's Supertrapp, which is not really that expensive, but is written in Fortran, and an old-fashioned dialect at that. As a result, it is a bit difficult to integrate into other projects (praised be f2c), and the programming interface is simply horrible; worse, there are some Fortran-induced limitations such as a maximum of 20 species in a mixture. I was wondering whether it would be legal to buy a copy of such a database (they usually sell with source code, no one can read Fortran anyway); take the data, possibly reformatting it as XML; implement a new programming interface from scratch; and publish the package as free software. Thermodynamic data is not an intellectual creation but a mere measurement, which was most likely done not by the programmers but by scientists funded with our tax money. What are your experiences and opinions on the matter? For the record, I am based in Germany, so the EU database directive applies."

Huh? Recent versions (ie, in the past couple decades) of Fortran are really very decent for scientific calculation, in many respects better than C. There's a ton of computational chemistry software, for example, written primarily in modern Fortran.

I used to work solely in FORTRAN for simulation work. The big advantage of Fortran90/95 over C is that the compilers are heavily optimized for doing iterated operations over every value of an array. So for say, fluid dynamics, it really is the best. I suspect you might be able achieve a similar speed in C, but that you would have to hand optimise instead (ugh).

I used to work solely in FORTRAN for simulation work. The big advantage of Fortran90/95 over C is that the compilers are heavily optimized for doing iterated operations over every value of an array. So for say, fluid dynamics, it really is the best. I suspect you might be able achieve a similar speed in C, but that you would have to hand optimise instead (ugh).

I'd mod these comments up but I don't have the points. It's clear this site lacks Mechanical Engineers who all learned Fortran and C.

Most stuff written *today* is written in modern fortran where you can actually have variable names of a decent length. Most legacy code that you have to rely on (e.g. linear algebra routines) are written in the cruddy old fortran. But it's solid code, works as a black box, and I would venture to guess that it's not a *whole* lot less readable than your average implementation of printf. Plus, if you want to update it to modern fortran, be my guest - hope you have a lot of time, patience, money, and a good

If the NIST program is the product of the work of US Government employees it is in the public domain. I would not be surprised if many of the commercial closed-source programs for the same purpose are based on it. In any case, tabulated data is not protected by US copyright so someone in the US could certainly do as you suggest.

The FAQ [nist.gov] claims that the US government has a copyright on the material. This could be possible if the material was not directly generated by the NIST itself --- for example, they paid a contractor to generate it and it is considered a "work for hire".

The facts themselves probably can't be considered to be under copyright.

OTOH, I agree with a previous poster that you should consult a lawyer if you want to actually do anything which isn't sheeple-ish with the data.

The EU database law specifically does not protect foreign databases unless that foreign country also creates a database a law and establishes mutual protection. The US has no such protection, in fact it seems no country outside the EU has established reciprocal database protection. It should be possible to do this open source project based on data from the US or from anywhere outside the EU.

The FAQ [nist.gov] claims that the US government has a copyright on the material.

The factual data in that database cannot be protected by copyright, it is not protected as a database in the US, and is not covered under EU law. The only copyright they could claim on it is either if it contains creative images or creative text or the like, then those particular elements could be protected, or they could perhaps claim a copyright on the creative arrangement and formatting of the data in the database. Both of those issued can be avoided.

What can be done is use this database and read out the needed factual data elements and then re-write it into the database for the open source project. Purely factual text-fields such as the name of an element or compound or whatever can be copied, just be careful not to copy any images or free-form text fields such as descriptive text or explanatory text. Then write the data out in your own arrangement. The best thing to do there is to arrange the data in some strict alphabetical or numerical order - there is no creativity and no copyrightability in that sort of unique ordering. That means not only storing the records in alphabetical order, but also order the data elements within each record in name-of-field alphabetical order. It might even be a good idea to rename any fields that care reasonably open to custom naming. There is no need to rename a field like "name" or "address" or "phone number", but a field like "work contact number" could easily be called "work phone".

The best way to go about it would be to create a mostly-empty, but functioning, database before even looking at your intended source material, that way by definition there is no copying of the formatting of the database. Once there is a functioning database design then the factual data elements can be copied from the source to fill the already-designed database.

I wasn't expecting to find the correct answer to a legal question here on Slashdot, but, there it is./thread. Too bad I don't have any mod points.

One nit, though, just be careful with "renaming a field" as a solution... that could still get you nailed as a derivative work. I do like the idea of building the framework from scratch, and only then populating it with the data.

Since neither me or you are USA copyright lawyer it is not safe to draw conclusions

I am not a lawyer, however I do have a exceptional level of amature expertise in this subject. It is one of my fields of geek-interest and geek-expertise. I have read the entire Title 17 US Copyright law, and I have have read many US Supreme Court copyright rulings, I have read many lower court copyright rulings, and I have read many other sources on the subject, and I have spend a fair amount of time on the international asp

This could be possible if the material was not directly generated by the NIST itself --- for example, they paid a contractor to generate it and it is considered a "work for hire".

'They' in this case would be the American public. If the American public paid for a 'work for hire' then the American public owns it. Thats not to say that they necessarily have 'rights' to it.. but your arguement as it stands doesnt seem to qualify.

I am a federal worker and I oversee some contracts that involve writing Fortran codes for simulating nuclear reactors. That is not quite right. You need to consult the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Chapter 27. Specifically, see

United States Code; Title 17; Chapter 1; Â 105 Subject matter of copyright; United States Government works. Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.US Code

Its possible that the contractors retain copyright, or they licensed someone else's code (these tend to block open source releases), but the government itself can't have copyright under US law, regardless of who wrote it.

I think it means that you don't gain copyright by merely putting data which is not otherwise copyrighted into a table.Of course if you already have the copyright on the things in the table, you won't lose that copyright by putting it into the table.

For example, the following table is probably not covered by copyright:

I don't know if you're trolling or just grossly misinformed, but that's not even close to correct. Lyrics are the copyrighted creative works of the person/people who wrote them. "Changing one word" does not allow someone else to then distribute the lyrics legally. That would be considered a "derivative work," the creation of which is a right provided to copyright holders under copyright law.

I didn't say the karaoke publisher could distribute the original song writers lyrics without license because they do, but by changing a word or two it they own the changes and it's easier for them to litigate copying because they can more easily should that it was their disk that was copied and can bring the original song writer in as an additional injured party.

If you submit a bug patch to a GPL'ed project, you own the copyright to the patch, the original programers own the copyright to their code.

I think he should just go ahead and create the software. Just getting evaluations and considering all prevailing laws might be so expensive that it would ruin any hope of doing the work. The idea that anyone can be legally safe in almost any profession is a thing of the past. My best notion is that a person simply take into account who would likely be offended or if it seems really likely that money could be made by a legal suit and then decid

And then talking to a lawyer so you can find out which part of "By clicking accept you irrevocably grant ownership of your DNA and all derivative works" is really enforceable, and what that means for the rest of it.

I would assume that it would be difficult to sell a commercial solution for scientific purposes unless it is based on already documented and accepted data. Basing your scientific work on calculations made by a commercial solution with homegrown data would make it difficult to openly document your method to other scientists. So why not find the published version of those data instead of lifting them out of software?

But what do I know? I am an engineer, not a scientist.

In my work I do a lot of calculations of water and steam properties, and the available software I know of is strictly using the calculation methods published by IAPWS. So if I wanted to, I could buy the IAPWS documentation and make my own software.

Databases are indeed copyrightable, but the U.S. requires an element of creativity to do so as decided in the case of Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc.

From the parent's link:

According to the Supreme Court, a compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship," citing the definition of a compilation in 17 U.S.C. 101.

This holding overruled numerous lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test of copyrightability. Under this test, if a compilation was created as a result of a great deal of effort (such as the collection of thousands of names and addresses), copyright protection would extend to the compilation regardless of the creativity or originality in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the facts.

The Supreme Court expressly stated that this "sweat of the brow" analysis was faulty, and that copyright extended only to the original selection, coordination, and arranging of data, and not to any unprotected facts contained within the compilation.

A database is copyrightable, but the applicable case law from when I practised (YEARS AGO!) was the phone directory - it was held to be sufficient that the copier rearranged and reorganised the information to provide a "mere spark of creativity".

Or, if the database is itself non-creative in terms of its selection and arrangement of uncopyrightable information, the database would be uncopyrightable as well. This is the problem that telephone white pages ran into in Feist; they contained all the listed numbers (where the phone company doesn't decide which numbers are and are not listed), in alphabetical order by the last name or name of business associated with the number. That selection and arrangement was non-creative. OTOH, a directory of your fav

I do not know about this exact database, but many scientific databases are hand-curated and extensively reviewed. Many do not include every measurement published in the literature, but carefully and judiciously select those data points deemed, by expert opinion, most reliable. Thermodynamic databases do not contains "facts" per se, but measured data points which may or may not be close to the facts. The editing and review process, which is quite an investment, does often create a solid foundation for copyright. These databases are not just a routine business, like a reformatted dump of the data from a telephone company.

I do not know about this exact database, but many scientific databases are hand-curated and extensively reviewed. Many do not include every measurement published in the literature, but carefully and judiciously select those data points deemed, by expert opinion, most reliable.

That's tricky. On the one hand, the selection isn't obviously non-creative, but on the other, it is for the facts which are most factual, rather than an arbitrary creative standard, e.g. the best thermodynamic properties to read about

I think that the biggest problem isn't intellectual property, but the people who administer it. I don't think that the demand is particularly great. As such, there isn't a great incentive to release it freely. There are costs to administering such a large DB. Furthermore, nobody wants their name on a database of all the fundamental properties because in that data there are bound to be mistakes. Caveat Emptor!
Also, while mixtures of hydrocarbons are common because of oil refining business, many soluti

I think that the biggest problem isn't intellectual property, but the people who administer it. I don't think that the demand is particularly great. As such, there isn't a great incentive to release it freely. There are costs to administering such a large DB. Furthermore, nobody wants their name on a database of all the fundamental properties because in that data there are bound to be mistakes.

You are looking at the liability issue for the creator/admin, the supply side. The bigger liability problem is on the engineer, demand side.

Something that is missing from this discussion, is some Chemical Engineer specific knowledge that I can attempt to provide. The whole point of a "steam table" and similar products like discussed here, is there is no accurate formula for vapor pressure at various temps. The simplistic linear equations taught in high school don't work at the extremes, or don't give acc

"no one can read Fortran anyway"...you must be new here. It certainly wasn't designed to the standards young engineers expect today, but given the limitations of processors back in the 60's to early 80's, it served its purpose. I did my first college CS class in Fortran back in '83. Anyone can write illegible code, but with a little effort, one could write fairly readable Fortran.

I can't find my copy of Supertrapp at the moment, but as I recall there is some strange wording in the license. It's definitely NOT public domain as asserted by the uninformed.

It's also not tabulated data. It's a collection of equations and empirical constants embedded in what may be the worst code I've ever seen.

It may be easier to track down the original papers and work from those, though that too is difficult as lots of the original work was published in obscure journals.

FWIW I am very comfortable w/ FORTRAN and prefer it for serious numerical work (default choice is C). I'm also quite skilled at interfacing FORTRAN to other languages.

I'm interested in working on such a project and have quite a bit of experience w/ the problem, though only limited experience w/ Supertrapp because it is so bad I tended to avoid using it unless I absolutely had to. Please send me an email so we can discuss more. rhb acm.org

I tend to work in the atmospheric sciences, where, as one might guess we work with microphysical processes and thermodynamic data. I would second the recommendation that working from the original, authoritative publications would be a good approach. If you're well-versed in the field already, you're familiar with the seminal works. If you're not, your job is bigger than you realize, as programming for a scientific project is rarely just finding equations and re-coding them, or finding a database of physical constants and calling them. You've got to understand where in the domain in question they come into play and use appropriate equations and parameterizations.

Fortran, even Fortran-66, is rarely unreadable. However, it often is written like a short story in a local dialect. The author has a method and style, and you have to understand it, or at least become conversant with it, before reading and understanding the flow of the code occurs. I should point out that this is really not different from any other language. Fortran, however, has been maligned because its roots were not in object-basis. Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 both, however, comply with the OO paradigm. The inherent problem is, CS departments often don't teach Fortran, and their faculty will tell you how horrid it is. Why? Because their discipline is COMPUTER science, not, say, solid earth geophysics, and they're conversant with a number of languages.and feel they can pick the best one for the job. The geophysicist, on the other hand, spent his time learning how and why those pesky tectonic plates move around, something the computer scientist never really studied unless, maybe, he took a rocks-for-jocks class and got really interested. Rather than mastering C, C++, Java and C#, the geophysicist learned just enough Fortran to get his work done, and proceeded down a different path. Since Fortran ("FORmula TRANslation") was developed to help discipline scientists transform their equations to operable code, this really makes sense.

My first computer initiation was using Fortran (Fortran-II) on an IBM 1401 while I was still in junior high school. My first formal course in programming used SWIFT, BASIC and SNOBOL, over the course of a summer while in high school. Virtually every course in college I took (I was not a CS major, but could/should have been from my transcript) was in Fortran (plus a pair of assembly language courses) because the choices were Fortran, Cobol or assembly. Imagine, if you will, not having a "modern language around, and having to code decent I/O or even decent APIs with that choice.

If only you were right, my life for the past two years would have been much easier. Give me inheritence, dynamic binding, and private members of derived types ("structs" or "classes" for everyone who doesn't speek fortran). THEN maybe I'll agree that these standards comply with the OO paradigm. 2003 certainly does, but point me to a single complier that fully implements it...

All of those can be accomplished in Fortran 90/95. There is even direct language support for the third requirement (private members of derived types), and I do it all the time; it works just like other public/private declarations, just placed inside the type definition. Inheritance and polymorphism (I'm guessing this is what dynamic binding means from a quick look at Wikipedia) are a bit trickier, but the techniques have been worked out and documented by these fellows [rpi.edu] (Viktor Decyk's page [ucla.edu] is also quite help

Who cares what the license says, if the license goes against the law itself?I read in another comment, that it's from the NIST project, tax funded, and by definition public domain.I don't know how often I see things, that are completely free, but where someone slapped a copyright on it, and acts as if you have to have a license to do anything with it.People are that stupid, and that arrogant. People also often do not know laws, even when they write licenses for a living.

FWIW I am very comfortable w/ FORTRAN and prefer it for serious numerical work

You might want to re-evaluate that position. Modern CPUs benefit enormously from 'hints' embedded in the machine code generated by compilers. My experience has been that this can have a significant impact on performance given the right circumstances - in fact I've even seen that compiling C with a C++ compiler can give significant performance increases simply because the C++ compiler was more mainstream and so better maintained and optimized. I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off th

I cannot help but think that a Fortran compiler is so far off the mainstream that the performance of its code will be significantly worse than a C++ compiler.

Modern fortran compilers are generally maintained by the processor makers themselves. The big advantage over C (and C++ AAAAGH! I once made the mistake of writing a PDE solver in C++ in high school...never again) is that those fortran compilers are optimised for iterated operations over every value of an array (for say, when each array value is the value of a variable at a given spatial coordinate). This makes Fortran much better for at least some (most of the one's I've had to work on) calculations.

This is quite wrong; modern FORTRAN compilers perform as well and often better than C++.

That has not been my experience, so perhaps you are quite wrong. It is true that C++ is "dangerous" in that if you have no clue what you are doing it is easy to introduce dynamic memory allocation or indirect function calls. However, when I last compared the assembly generated with a Fortran compiler vs. that for a C++ compiler the Fortran code lacked some hints for conditionals and loops and was not as well optimized (compiled with optimization turned on) as a result the code executed 10-20% slower.

Then you must have intentionally crippled the Fortran code somehow. Modern Fortran compilers are just as advanced as C++. Just look at Intel's compilers, or the (now defunct) Pathscale compilers. Or compare XLC and XLF on PowerPC. The Fortran compilers blow the C and C++ ones out of the run. All the supercomputing facilities I've worked with here in Sweden recommend Fortran primarily, and C/C++ as fallbacks. (In severe cases, C/C++ and other software might even be ported to Fortran by personnel at the facil

Items created/published by the U.S. government are in the public domain at least in the U.S. I'm not sure if the rights are granted abroad as well.

However, items created under a contract to the U.S. government may or may not be in the public domain. There's a section of US law that companies have to invoke in their contract or the software license regarding U.S. government "limited rights" to keep their code or other work private. On the other hand, NIST DATA shouldn't be copyrightable in any case, although

People using this NIST data do it because it has NIST sign on it, so they don't risk being dependent on tabulated values from not exhaustively verified source. If you're rewritting the source code, you should take care to establish means by which users could check that data are unaltered with respect to what NIST servers contain. If you work for renowned institute, that should be easy, just store the database on your server and sync it with NIST, along with sources of data cited at NIST website.

As it comes to Fortran programming, it's optimal language for scientific computing. Modern dialects have some of the power of C (allocatable arrays, long subourtine names, free format code, modules, interoperability with C), but, what is preferable in scientific computing, programmer isn't encouraged to tinker with machine-specific stuff. Many existing codes are written in Fortran, e.g. powerful LAPACK library and many computational chemistry packages, so for many physicists/chemists/engineers Fortran is the only language they know and care of. Moreover, Fortran in recent years has gained parallel-programming functionality thanks to OpenMP (it's provided with features eqivalent to that in C/Cpp).

I imagine if you derive approximation formulas to the figures, and publish them packaged as software youwould be able to license it whichever way you liked - sounds "transformative" to me. Might even qualify as pr

I think you need to get over your dislike of Fortran and make use of the many good and modern Fortran compilers available to you, both freeware and commercial. Any of them has got to be a better solution than f2c - if you think Fortran is hard to read, that's nothing compared to the cryptic output of f2c, and then you're locked in to using the buggy and archaic f2c support library.

I am not familiar with the application you're using, but the limits you describe are almost certainly not due to the coding lan

Write your open source software to work with the data, and set up a website or something where people can contribute data points? There would obviously by no guarantee on any particular data contributed, but you could have some provision to flag data as wrong or dubious and store multiple conflicting values until you sort out the conflict somehow?

Uh, let's see now. You're going to expect all the idiots on the Internet to make precise measurements of (for example) the energy released in some chemical reaction at 357 Celcius temperature and 4.435 atmospheres of pressure?

Are we reality-based here?

What you want is a particular kind of crowdsourcing called "science". It tends to cost money because some people's thermomenters don't go up to 357C, so they need to buy better ones.

You are not the first to encounter this kind of problem. The traditional answer is to not mess with the Fortran, but to put a wrapper around it in the language of your choice and leave the Fortran internals alone.

From your description of the limitations of the Fortran code, I get the strong sense that this would be the best approach for you to take. It can be very difficult to tease out the reasoning behind some of those archaic Fortran constructions: they tended to be blends of methods to deal with hardw

I'm a chemical engineer, and part of my job is to put together physical property packages for our simulator. I have no idea if you can legally do this by adapting something from another database, but I would contribute some of the information I have if you can get through the legal stuff.

Mainly, I rely on NIST's JANAF publication for thermodynamic data (inorganics only), the DIPPR database, and the Yaw's Physical Property Handbook. For binary VLE data DECHEMA is the best references Of these, JANAF is

...they specialize in international copyright law. While a US Citizen may be able to "copy" or "rewrite" code US taxpayers paid for, don't assume other, non-contributing (non tax-paying to the US) foreigners can openly copy and redistribute code that is technically the property of US citizens. Personally, I don't care as your topic is of little interest to me, but unless someone is attorney/lawyer in these copyrights, I wouldn't listen to anyone here.

It's either copyrighted or it isn't. Nothing to do with the citizenship of the reader, ever. At least I have never seen anything like this. The only thing that comes close is reciprocity clauses where another country's copyrights are only recognized if it recognizes the other country's, but nothing based on the country of the *user*, just the work.

Empirical models of thermodynamic properties are definitely protected by copyright. There is a high-value market for these models, and different models of the same thermodynamic process will evaluate differently so it is a valuable creative product rather than a mere description of reality. For fields where tiny improvements in efficiency generate big cost savings, you want to use the most accurate model available where "most accurate" will be a function of the use case.

Thermodynamic property models are not measurements of reality, they are mathematical models of a physical process derived from empirical data. They are what you use to predict reality when it is not possible or practical to measure it. Turning the empirical data points into continuous functions is a creative step and the value of the creative step is in minimizing the divergence between the model and reality over as broad a range as possible. There are companies that specialize in producing and selling ultra-accurate thermodynamic property models.

Ya know, for a guy who worked in a Patent office, Albert really missed out on stunning opportunity on royalties on general relativity. I'm pretty sure most countries have exemptions on copyright and patents for mathematical formulae. Mine (South Africa) sure does, and so does America [lbl.gov]

NIST presumably charges on a cost recovery basis. They keep the data updated (latest version appears to be v3.2 as of 2007) and have to pay for the due diligence of keeping up with the scientific literature. Presumably either the DB (STPLIB2) or the documentation or separate publications describes how the data are accumulated and vetted. The software appears to permit the values to be updated by users (undoubtedly also familiar with the appropriate journals and research) in between releases.

Or in terms of people FORTRAN is the crabby old guy in the basement that knows where all the bodies are buried and all the bodges and bandaids applied over decades to make the project workable (also known as the FORTRAN Programmer;).

I would simply change your last step
- and publish the package as free software
with
- and give back the restructured database to the copyright owner for them to publish just the data free from copyright

If that doesn't sound right to them, then suggest that you will put it on a web page only accessible to yourself, leak the web link to Google and after it's indexed say "sorry for the mistake"...

Most quality assurance processes also are "measurements" (with possibly a following remedy if non-conformant)

Three words: Don't do it. Here's a *real life* story as to why. Once upon a time (ok, about 13-14 years ago) there was a large Greek software company that wanted to make a property tax program. The problem was that they didn't have the data. Yours truly got to reverse engineer a competitors database. Yes, I extracted all of their pathetically encrypted DB (substitution cipher WTF?). Now, if you know anything about databases or mailing lists or even log tables, you know that there are often deliberately false entries so that it's easy to know your data is be ripped (a bit earlier in time I caught out a Cypriot company ripping off the english greek dictionary data I'd been involved in that way).

I warned the project manager that sure go ahead and use the data as a basis for programming but not for the production program.

A couple of months later, the competitors lawyers appeared and (cough) out of court (cough) settlement.

Never did find out how much it cost "my" software house...

In the end they had to employ a gaggle of impoverished undergrads to build their own DB.

So, be very very careful. It might be a good idea to *ask* if you can re-use the data - often it's possible for non commercial purposes...

IANAL but, the issue of the copyright status of databases has come before the Supreme Court. The issue was: is an alphabetized list copyrightable? The court said no, because the database itself did not contain originality, it just was pure information. The key fact here is whether or not the database you describe is original, or it just contains facts. From wikipedia:
"The ruling of the Court was written by Justice O'Connor. It examined the purpose of copyright and explained the standard of copyrightabi

You show yourself as a snob, Sir. Probably most any serious geek - including this one - will understand Fortran just fine. And given a little bit of time and money it can be rewritten into pretty much anything else since most other languages are supersets of Fortran.

All the formulation for the prediction of water properties are published by International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) so that they can be used.
It is often important to use exactly the same correlations so that that all the thermodynamic data are self-consistent. Therefore the formulations are standardized by an international body.
I do not think that the use of this formulae is in any way restricted because such restriction would defeat the very purpose - standarization.
See http://www.iapws.org/ [iapws.org] for the collection of the current formulations.
There may be a restriction for a particular implementation (computer program) or sets of tables ( "lookup tables" and interpolation are often used for performance). Not sure.
Hope someone starts an extension to implement these kind of things in Gnumeric.
Cheers. Ephraim the horse.

Supertrapp uses pre-Fortran 90 syntax, meaning identifiers have 6 letter at maximum. This makes it sure that complex code will never be readable, because you can only use acronyms that are way too short to be clear. Point taken, however, that this is a fault of the implementation rather than the language's.

Yes, I am deliberately replying to a top-level post to ask a question. A question about something that arguably doesn't belong in the summary (editors, anyone?).

I was wondering whether it would be legal to buy a copy of such a database

That's a legal question. The answer to that question might seriously complicate your life if you get it wrong. What would possess a person to ask this of Slashdot instead of contacting a lawyer? Better yet, why would a German expect a USA-based Web site to be familiar with the nuances of German (or EU) copyright law? I'm trying to picture a situation where I'd contact a German online forum to ask for legal advice pertaining to American law and I just can't come up with anything.

I suppose next we'll see an Ask Slashdot which says "hi, I'm a diabetic and I forgot how much insulin I am supposed to inject myself with, please advise." And I'll have to scroll down significantly to see a partly-buried comment where someone finally suggests that perhaps he should be asking a doctor...

slashdot knows more than most IP lawyers. You have to remember, lawyering is essentially about either telling you what case law precedent has established (like don't rob banks), or arguing for your side, not about "truth" or "right and wrong". Most lawyers are more the type that will take the money, then figure out how to argue the way you want... they don't do good with "advice" not tied to rulings in court. Ask the right question and you'll pay the lawyers a bunch less money... nobody wants THAT!

Slashdot is an international website; while hosted in the US, there seems to be at least about the same amount non-US readers as US readers. (I believe there even was some statistics shown that indicated that there were more non-US readers, but I may be mixing up websites WRT those.)

/. is not an US only web-site. However, you're absolutely right with your advice to ask a lawyer. Also I would recommend to read the license which comes with the data and code. And I want to add: Fortran is a readable language and it is not really hard to learn.